Can anyone recommend me a setup to virtualize Linux under Windows that runs smoothly?

I by now have wasted far too much time trying to setup a VM on my decently decked out machine (i5 13600KF, RTX 3080, 32GB DDR5, Win11 on a 4K Display) to run some kind of Linux in there that runs perfectly smooth - mostly for Development purposes.

So far I have tried all 3 major vm hosting softwares for windows (VMWare, Hyper V and Virtual Box) along side various (admittedly beginner friendly) distros (Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Mint, ...) yet I have not once gotten a System up and running with smooth animations and no notable input latency. Also I have of course turned on Hardware virtualization in my bios and benchmarks usually show that CPU performance seems to be where I expect it.

So I wanna ask the community what setup they are using under windows that just runs any kind of Linux smoothly and what point I may be missing.

Also installing Linux natively is not really an option for me since I want to be able to run Multiplayer games and I still consider myself a Linux beginner and don't wanna commit to install Linux directly on my host machine yet.